


The Wanderer Goes

by genarti



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Backstory, Cameos, F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, Parental Death, mild teen romance, turning into the moon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-30
Updated: 2009-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti/pseuds/genarti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A life, under the moon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wanderer Goes

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ilikebigtoes as part of [AtLA Ladyfest](http://atla-ladyfest.livejournal.com/), and originally posted [here](http://atla-ladyfest.livejournal.com/3553.html).
> 
> The poem between sections is [Back To Heaven](http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/backtoheaven.htm#_Toc197250729) by Chon Sang-Pyong, as translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-Moo Kim. The poem in the picture is [Wanderer](http://www.geocities.com/lesliebarclay/KoreanPoems.html) by Mok-Wol Pak; I'm afraid I don't know the translator. The picture is a bit gratuitous really, but I couldn't bear to not include that poem somehow. Thanks to Becca and Heather for beta-ing!

  
_I'll go back to heaven again  
Hand in hand with the dew  
that melts at a touch of the dawning sky_   


Yue is three years old today. Her mommy and daddy had a birthday party for her earlier, and everybody came, even the grumpy old people, because she's a princess. It means she has duties, and it means everybody in the tribe has to be very important to her even if they're grumpy and smelly and she doesn't like them very much, and it means everybody comes to her birthday parties and they have lots of food. Five of Master Pakku's students performed, and she clapped her hands until they hurt inside her mittens because of how they made the water swirl in shapes, spinning and joining and spinning, like the spirit-fish swimming.

Now the party is over, and everybody has gone home. Yue is supposed to be in bed. Mommy tucked her in and Daddy told her how glad they were they had their little moon-daughter, like they do every night, and they both kissed her forehead. Yue is supposed to be a good girl and stay in bed, because princesses have duties. Right now her duty is to be asleep.

But she was naughty and snuck out anyway. She couldn't help it. It's her birthday, she told herself stubbornly as she crept down the icy hallway, and she tells herself the same thing now as she pushes open the round door to the fishes' room. It's her birthday and she's three years old, and she's allowed a _little_ naughtiness on her birthday, isn't she? It's nothing bad. It won't hurt anybody. It's just that the moon spirit and the ocean spirit didn't get to come to the party, and that's not fair. They're the whole reason she's alive to turn three.

"Hello," she whispers to the swimming fish, as she drops to her knees at the edge of the sacred pond. They circle, circle, circle: yin and yang, ebb and neap, day and night, moon and ocean. Yue can't feel the water the way benders can, and she doesn't know if she ever will. She wants to, but some people don't. Her father can't, and her mother only enough to soothe a headache or a bumped knee. But secretly, she thinks that nobody else in the world can feel the fish and the moon the way she does. When she closes her eyes, she can feel it in her blood, tug and loose, circling through her veins.

"I'm sorry you couldn't come to my feast. We had to have it up in the air where we can breathe. But I brought you some food."

It's too warm for mittens in here, so she tugs them off with her teeth. She's glad it's so warm, because she can't get her parka on without help, and so she had to hurry through the freezing night outside. But the moon is full, so it was okay; it felt warmer than it is. She did stop by the coat-wall to dig in her parka pockets, though, and dig out the crispy dried sea-plums she hid there in the middle of the feast. They're a little soggy now, but she can still crumble them up and drop the pieces in the water. They fall with tiny splashes.

The fish swim, swim, swim, in their steady circles.

"Do you like it?" Yue asks, suddenly worried. She can feel her eyes welling up with tears, even though she's a big girl now. It was supposed to be perfect; they were supposed to be happy, because she's three now, because she brought them her party. "It's sea-plums. They're really good. Please eat them, spirits. I don't have any special spirit food, I'm sorry." Maybe princesses are supposed to know that kind of thing. Maybe she should know how to find spirit food good enough for the fish-spirits of moon and ocean.

The fishes' mouths are moving. They circle, each head chasing the other's tail, and as they pass the crumbs of sea-plum they open their wide low mouths and suck in each soggy bit: _glip, glip, glip_. The water is clearing fast.

Yue hugs her knees and beams at them, and doesn't care at all if her toes are still cold.

"Happy my birthday, spirits," she whispers. "Thank you for coming to my party."

  


  
_I'll go back to heaven again  
With the dusk, together, just we two,  
at a sign from a cloud after playing on the slopes_   


Yue is eight, and her mother is dying.

The tribe's healers can't do anything for her. Yugoda is here every day to soothe Takki's pain with cool water and delicate manipulation of her chi, but every day she shakes her head sadly when she thinks Yue isn't looking. The sickness is too deep in Takki's body, and nothing can touch it. Every day she looks thinner.

Yue curls up against her mother's side, and Mom strokes her white hair. Mom's touch is light, and her hands shake sometimes, but she's always gentle.

"The moon spirit should heal you," Yue whispers fiercely into her mother's shoulder. "It saved me, it can save you, I know if we ask the spirits right they will."

"Oh, baby," Mom says, and kisses her hair. Yue squeezes her eyes tight shut so she won't cry like a little kid, because that's not a yes. "Yue, the spirit of the ocean gives us life, but not forever. You were a little baby. You hadn't even lived yet. I've had years and years. I've had a lovely little girl to know."

"You won't even try!"

Mom rests her head against Yue's, and one of her dark braids flops across Yue's shoulder. Yue has to work even harder to not cry, and she's afraid to look up, because from the sound of Mom's voice she thinks Mom might be about to cry too. It's scary when parents cry. "Every night," Mom whispers, "every night I ask the moon, and every day I ask the ocean spirits for more time with you and your daddy. I'll come with you to the spirit pool next time I can, and you can ask them again if you want to. But I don't want you to expect anything, baby. That's not how the spirits work. They don't have enough life to give to everybody."

"It's not _fair_ ," Yue sobs, and now she really is crying, even if she is a princess, and Mom strokes her hair and hugs her until she's all cried out.

She doesn't tell her mother or her father that every day she goes to the spirit pool. She listens to the moon and the ocean, and she asks and asks and asks.

She knows it doesn't work that way, because the moon spirit tells her without saying a word. It tells her with its silence; it tells her with the calm glitter of light on water, with a swelling tide of love and sorrow in her heart, with its steady path across the sky and the sacred carp's steady circles in their warm grotto. It tells her when a dead koala-otter washes onto an ice floe beside the gates, and stays dead. It tells her with the way her mom's cheeks get hollower and hollower.

The ocean gives life, the spirits say in the steady wash of waves and tide, and life flows back to the ocean. The moon spirit only gives strength, and that's not enough for Mom.

Yue asks anyway, again and again and again.

  


  
_I'll go back to heaven again.  
At the end of my outing to this beautiful world_   


Yue is fourteen. A young woman, her father tells her with a smile sometimes, though he always adds hastily that she's not a grown woman _quite_ yet. "I know," she reminds him, and hides a grin they both know is there. "I'm still just your little girl, right?"

She _is_ a young woman, though. Her woman's blood came last year. Mom's been dead for five years, so it was old Yugoda who taught her what to expect. "It follows the moon," Yugoda said. "More or less, anyway. Not everybody's perfectly regular."

But Yue knew hers would match perfectly. And it does, flowing out at the dark of the moon, when the stars and the aurora borealis are the sky's only lights, easing when the crescent sliver reappears. "Spirit of the moon, you can come back any time you want," she mutters as she trundles towards Yugoda's healing room to have her cramping stomach eased, but she knows it doesn't work that way. The moon comes in its time and goes in its time, and no one can change that.

Yue knows that soon she'll be engaged. Already some of the tribe's young men -- and a few of the older ones -- are watching her sidelong. Everyone's always watched her, because she's a princess and that means she's in the public eye every moment of her life, but it's new that young men and their parents are talking quietly to her father. It's new that young men are giving her small carved tokens, showing off the skill that might one day go into her betrothal necklace.

But she's only fourteen, and she's not engaged yet.

Which means it's okay, she tells herself, to notice that Nonu has lovely eyes, and a shy smile when he glances her way, and long-fingered hands that are clever with carving knife and harpoon alike. It's okay, because everybody knows he'll be betrothed to Kui as soon as their parents finish arguing about the details, but he's not betrothed yet and neither is she.

So she smiles back at him, feeling her cheeks heat, and glances down at her fish-and-blubber stew. Later, when she's being poled along in her gondola, he runs alongside, and she smiles at him again. She doesn't budge from the position she's learned -- kneeling, hands in her sleeves, motionless and dignified and regal -- but she tells him, "Meet me here at midnight, if you want."

"I'll be there," he promises, and his smile is quick and pleased and nicer than ever.

It's okay to slip out into the summer dusk of midnight, or at least it's close enough to okay that she can tell herself that and believe it. Nonu will be engaged to Kui soon enough, and Yue will be engaged to someone else, so both of them know exactly what's going to happen, and what isn't. This is just one night, and a chance to have her first kiss under the full summer moon. A chance to be fourteen.

And Nonu's shy smile, she finds, is really nice to kiss.

  


  
_I'll go back and say: It was beautiful..._   


Yue is the moon.

Yue, who is Tui too now, sees Katara bending the hot scummy waters of a swamp; sees the Avatar practicing earthbending, frustrated and stubborn and learning bit by bit; sees Sokka, crossing a high pass of rocks between two lakes, with another girl but casting long looks at Yue in the rising moon.

She sees a young girl with a fire-scarred ankle, crying into her knees after a momentary friend steals her family's best ostrich-horse. She sees a tiny scruffy child asleep high in a tree while her best friend stands watch; the girl was once called Lily, and the boy was Hani, but now they've made their own names, to suit orphans and outlaws fighting the Fire Nation. She sees a grey-haired woman who was once a princess herself, murmuring the names of her children to the silent sunless night. She sees the Earth King on a rooftop, pointing out constellations to his bear. She sees an old woman who was once the young girl Kanna, shading her eyes and praying to the moon for her grandchildren's safety. She sees a circus acrobat standing on her head, arching to tap her toes against the ground; she sees the acrobat's friend, eyes icy and narrowed, sending tiny slivers of knives to a target's heart again and again. She sees a mother and father in the Earth Kingdom, asking every spirit they can think of to watch over their poor blind daughter. She sees her own father, silent and haggard, staring up at her for half the night. She sees a troupe of brightly clad nomads sprawled in a clearing, plinking a gleefully out-of-tune song to her beauty.

She smiles at them all. She is the moon goddess, not the young girl Yue who kissed a boy from the Southern Tribe on an ice-bridge and giggled, not the child who was mesmerized by carp; she sees them all, every one. Every girl and boy and man and woman, every child, every turtleduck and humming-firefly. Every creature that watches the moon glide across the sky. She is with them, and she smiles upon them, and she lights them with the glow of her face and hair and her long fluttering cloud-sleeves. She has a thousand thousand friends by moonlight.

She'll never touch any of them. The moon is with them all, and Yue is with none of them, and sometimes she misses being that young troubled girl so much she can hardly bear it. She weeps in the spirit world, hiding her face from the sun in gossamer sleeves and in Hei Bai's furry panda shoulder, because the spirit world and the airless sky are all she can touch now. But she never lets living people see her tears.

A princess's duty is to her people. A princess's duty is to love her people, and to serve them, and to spread her happiness over them like silk and moonbeams.

Yue is still herself, and she has a world full of people and a thousand thousand friends, and she loves them all.

And with all her heart, she still loves the moon.

  


Author's notes: The poem between sections is [Back To Heaven](http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/backtoheaven.htm) by Chon Sang-Pyong, as translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-Moo Kim. The poem in the picture is [Wanderer](http://www.geocities.com/lesliebarclay/KoreanPoems.html) by Mok-Wol Pak; I'm afraid I don't know the translator. The picture is a bit gratuitous really, but I couldn't bear to not include that poem somehow. Thanks to Becca and Heather for beta-ing!   



End file.
